Excellence in People & Talent

Winner

Katarina Berg - Spotify

Spotify as a business and HR as a function have both come a long way since Katarina joined the company in late 2013. She has lead the people strategy development and execution through the company’s whirlwind transition from start-up to a mature, international, and recently successfully listed public company.

Katarina and her team are focused on the company’s long-lasting hyper growth and move into new markets. The company strategy operations, mission, and values also sit with her, and the People team are building both culture and the business by enabling, engaging and empowering the employees. “Think global, act local” is the Spotify philosophy for people, culture, and compensation.

Spotify is diverse, innovative and ever-changing, and being data-driven is core, so Katarina’s mission has been to grow leadership, reinvent processes, disrupt HR and make sure the digital infrastructure provides all the necessary data to establish an environment where creative and passionate people can be their very best.

Runners up

Andrea Pattico - MVF

Andrea has repositioned MVF’s HR team to a People Team with the mandate to be culture champions. In the past 12 months, the team launched an award-winning onboarding program (StartSmart) and a Management Development Academy which has since been accredited by the Institute of Leadership and Management. Andrea’s strategy to move MVF from a ‘perkplace’ to having a holistic Health and Wellbeing strategy was recognised as a differentiator for the Company’s ranking in the Sunday Times Top 100 – MVF moved from no. 6 to no. 2 in the UK, and to no. 1 in London.

Andrea’s work has not only impacted employee engagement and culture, it has significantly improved core processes, reducing hiring time by 50% and hiring double the roles originally forecast by the business as it went through a period of rapid growth.

Ellie Romer-Lee - Onfido

Since Ellie joined Onfido in 2014, the company has grown to 180 people across six locations on three continents – and it continues to grow strongly, having seen a 4x increase in revenue in the past 12 months.

With such rapid scaling, Ellie enables business performance by ensuring that the right people are in the right roles, with the right responsibilities and mandates. In particular, Ellie stresses the need for the People function to ‘unblock sticking points’ within the company’s operations.

Ellie has spoken to start-up CEOs at seed events, run workshops for other players in the tech industry, and mentors at a scale-up academy – thereby contributing her expertise across the growth curve.